A plan is a drawing; in the context of measured building survey and topographical surveys it represents the features on your property on a PDF or DWG drawing. These are used for your planning application and for your architect to produce your construction (proposed) drawings. There are several types of plans. They are:
Floor Plans
Section Plans
Roof Plans
Loft Plans
Elevation Plans (there are also internal and external plans, most of the requests are just external plans. The only time you need an internal plan is when you have detail artwork or ornate walls that needs to be represented on your measured building survey)
Topographical Plans (or also called Land Survey Plans)
Ceiling Plans
You should not confuse it with a site plan. A site plan is a drawing/illustration that shows your property in context to other properties. It is based on an Ordnance map and can be purchased online (for roughly £8-10; depending on the scale https://www.buyaplan.co.uk/ ). You need one for all planning application.
A site plan looks like this:
Example of a site plan
Here are some examples of the plans mentioned above:
An elevation is a plan that shows the front, side, and rear facade (or lead of the building). This includes :
window/door positions,
different surfaces; and,
height of the building.
When is an elevation plan required?
Elevations are usually required whenever your planning proposal requires external alterations of the property.
Elevations can form part of a street scene drawing. A street scene is a collection of several properties’ elevations as viewed from the street. This needs to detail the:
different materials,
window position,
heights and
any other features…
that can demonstrate the style and look of other buildings on your property. This is necessary for planning applications where you are planning on changing the outlook of your property.
A DWG file is a file format produced from Autodesk AutoCAD, in the context of construction; designers, architects, engineers and surveyors produces drawings or illustration on the software and save them to .dwg files. As a client you can view the file by downloading a software called DWG Trueview from the AutoDesk’s website or you can freely view the DWG files online using the A360 Viewer (watch the video below to learn how to do just that).
Sometimes you will also hear your architect or designer talk about a .dxf file, it is a similar format but it is slightly more universal than .dwg and allows the user to open the drawings in different softwares much easily without loss of data. The DXF format can also be used on other softwares such as vectorworks. However, the .dxf format contains a lot less functionality and you would need to convert it to the original DWG format if you need to edit the file (or the native file extension of the particular software). As a client you won’t need to worry about the technicalities, all you need to know is how to open it, take a look around and print the drawings you have commissioned for your property.
The A360 viewer is useful and easily accesible if you just want to view a document. The only disadvantage is that it can take 2-3 minutes for you to view the files online as it needs to process the document. It is also not the best tool to print the DWG file. If you want to print the DWG file, download DWG Trueview from AutoDesk’s website.
Here is a quick video to explain how the A360 viewer works:
At Icelabz, you will notice that all of our focus is on speed and convenience.
Since working on both the website, server, content and the operation of Icelabz we’ve focused on speed, automation and taking the business to the 21st Industry.
This has been challenging as we needed to develop tools and processes that were brand new to the industry.
We’ve learnt from other industry; namely tech, finance and manufacturing to devise internal processes to deliver speed and quality to our clients.
What we learnt
We’ve listened and delivered…
Our customers wanted:
Faster turn around
More information
High Accuracy
We took these on board and worked on it for a whole year to devise;
new procedures
surveying methods
drawing methods
Data retention methods
to help deliver surveys to both home owners and architect.
The outcome from the research
This has been a challenge to try to cater an old industry and service to the next generation.
We had to implement:
Better online content
Faster website
Faster servers to process survey data
Faster methods
employing innovative and untested equipment, software and resources.
Everything we implement in the business is focused on saving minutes, hours and days. We probably spent over £50k in the last year to test out new methods of working, surveying and drawing.
It has been a learning curve, we’ve lost a lot of money on some projects to test out new methods to then refine it.
For example; we used to survey a three storey building in roughly two days, now we’ve reduced it to 8 hours with a lot more information that we use to.
We have also reduced the number of staff on a project from 2-3 to 1-2.
With new technology like 3D scanning, we can now produce additional elevations, sections months after we surveyed the property. The quality is excellent and adequate for pre-design services such as measured building surveys, and topographical surveys.
And for convenience; we’ve implemented a small online page for your project once you have created. Here is an example of the web page here:
You can try it out here https://icelabz.co.uk/project/new – all you have to do is create an enquiry, and it will generate a unique project page for you to upload files and manage your specification.
That is why when you navigate any of our websites or get any correspondences from us we aim at providing you with our service with speed and convenience. These are dedicated to our needs and our customers. They have 99.9% uptime, and in the event of failures, we can recover our status online within 5-10min using some new data centre technology.
Aside from our online presence of our website, we process all of our works securely on really powerful servers. More specifically servers designed to process digital rendering like the avatar or toystory movie. (well this is what Dell and our other supplier informed us)
Nothing is saved on our staff’s computer; everything is in the cloud. This means any of our surveyors, managers and project organisers do not need high-end computer laptops to produce extensive resource tasks. Our new servers currently hold over 9TB of data and growing monthly. We still have over 3TB of files to upload from our archives. The server has 48 cores and 64GB of Ram.
